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kkleiner writes "A new device will keep a liver alive outside of the human body for up to 24 hours. Developed at Oxford, the OrganOx circulates oxygenated red bloods cells and nutrients through the liver while maintaining the proper temperature. Doctors estimate that this new technique could double the number of livers available, saving the lives of thousands who die every year awaiting transplant."

It is good if you can keep it alive, because it keeps it viable for transplant to a dying patient for longer. So keeping the liver alive longer means more people receive transplants, so more people live longer, fuller lives.

That seems like a huge generalization, as there are thousands of types of cancers. Also seems like you're thinking very narrowly in an attempt to criticize the researchers. Perhaps there is a chemotheraputic that is really effective at killing a type of cancer, but is also super effective at destroying your liver. Perhaps you could beat cancer by taking your liver out and keeping it going while taking the drug, then putting it back in. Or perhaps this technology advancing a little could allow you to tak

INTRODUCTION — After initial reluctance to transplant patients with alcoholic liver disease, it is now clear that transplantation offers an excellent survival advantage in appropriately selected patients, equal to that for other disease indications. The original reluctance stemmed from the p

I have had a liver/kidney transplant. The MELD scoring process determines who get the next liver available. Blood type is considered, transplants match blood type, even though this is not strictly technically necessary, because otherwise, type O (universal donor, anyone can use type O) patients would be on longer lists then other blood types - it's a fairness problem. MELD score considers various blood test score indicators for how sick you are. The sicker you are, the higher score you get, and thus hig

How can there be no justification? I have nothing against prolonging an alcoholic's agony, but this should be handled by putting them on a bottom of the list. People who don't intend to destroy their livers should be given precedence IMHO. Given that the shortage of organs of all kinds is going to stay with us for the foreseeable future, this pretty much means that in fact drinkers are not going to get transplants. Yes, I do realize that there are many things that must match in a liver and it may just happe

Of course, how available do they have to get before you do? Given the study someone else posted showing that there is already a fair supply of livers, and increasing availability may not decrease mortaility.... perhaps a surplus of livers means that the availability of transplant can be opened to more people.

What's a fair supply in terms of the probability that a recipient finds a matching donor? Just having plenty of donor organs may simply mean that you'll have plenty of livers that none of your recipients are good matches for. It may well be that, for example, people with less likely combinations of some matching factors (as I shall call them) are more likely to get liver disease. So it's more likely for an unlikely liver to get sick -- then good luck finding a matching donor organ. It's a made up scenario,

"The liver is the only internal human organ capable of natural regeneration of lost tissue; as little as 25% of a liver can regenerate into a whole liver." Other organs can heal, the liver can actually grow back.

The liver is used to living at the tail end of the circulatory supply, after all the other organs have gotten their share. Plus, one of its main jobs is detoxifying the blood, so it can put up with higher levels of contaminants in the blood. In other words, if you are testing out an organ-sustaining machine, and you can't guarantee that you can keep the blood pristine, the liver is a pretty good choice for trying things out.

This is quite specific to liver transplants in the United States. Here most patients who die while awaiting a liver transplant have had an offer of a donor liver. 55% of patients who die have had the offer of a high-quality donor liver.

Increasing supply will always be a good thing, but there are huge issues to be addressed in making sure those on the US wait list for a liver transplant actually get a transplant from the available organ supply. It seems patients and doctors are turning down way too many good organs.

"Our data show that the current liver allocation system has provided one or more transplant opportunities to nearly all candidates before death/delisting. Therefore, simply increasing the availability of de-ceased donor livers or the number of offers may not substantially reduce wait-list mortality." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22841780 [nih.gov]

The most heartbreaking thing about that, I was just reading the story of someone who died after being delisted. Delisted because he was a cancer patient on medical marijuana, and testing positive for marijuana disqualified him for a liver.

The rationale? A positive on the drug test may indicate drug abuse and smoking increases exposure to aspergillius fungus, both of which are risk factors for the implanted organ.

seriously... and to think there is actually not a shortage of livers.... thats just terrible.

It gets worse when you realize that the shortages are the result of including people that couldn't be given a transplant even if there were a perfect match available right now. Either they're no longer healthy enough or they're otherwise not cleared for the transplant. In either case they're kept on the list to bolster efforts to get more organs.

Which is problematic because in the US the standards employed to ensure that the system doesn't turn people into organ donors when there's still a chance of saving

What's more, in many places they're changing the standards so that it's opt out and good luck if you happen to be taken to a hospital that doesn't have a record of you not wanting to give up your organs, or where you have specific wishes you want respected.

I'm going to go out on a short, cynical limb and guess that the hospitals still get paid (well) for removing and preserving the organs from such "donors" whether or not they have a chance of finding a recipient, and that these same hospitals lobby for the revised standards in the name of "saving more people."

I think you may have guessed wrong. This page [lutheranhospital.com] states that the costs of harvesting the organ is borne by the recipient/the recipient's insurance. If correct, it is very much in the interests of the hospital harvesting the donor organs for them to be used rather than discarded. There would be no economic motivation to harvest an organ that they know will not be used.

For the hospital you linked, it does sound like the organ is not harvested until they know there's a recipient. But there still have to be some cases where the transplant doesn't happen. It's hard to imagine the hospital simply writing off their costs in those cases.

What requirement for liver survival is not being met? I recall quite some time ago when it was considered to be some sort of breakthrough when they realized "you know that pump we use when we do heart surgery? The body needs pulsing circulation to survive, so let's do that instead of just streaming fluid." I have to wonder if they are trying something similar here.